Reactions to Flames of War V.2

So, it's been a couple days now since the mini-rulebook and the mid-war compilation lists came out for Flames of War and the official forums are still full of noise, mostly of the negative sort.

I'm still reading through the rules, but they seem ok to me. There are a few errors, but not too many, and some were caught in time to be fixed in the hardcover printing. The changes seem to be good to me. Some have had problems with some of the changes, but overall it looks like a good revision.

The compilation lists are a different matter entirely. At current count the errata thread has reached 10 pages, mostly with errors related to the two compilation books. Leaving aside the complaints of those who are simply unhappy with changes in their army list, there is simply too much missing or incorrect data. I won't go into details but these are mostly things that could have been caught with more proofreading. They simply should have sent the proofs out to more players for review before sending them to the press.

I'd give them more of a break, but they knew they had problems after they released the preview lists for the minor axis powers. Within hours of release people found mistakes with each of those lists. They should have realized at that point that they needed better proofreading of the whole book and gotten the proofs out to more eyes. The result is going to be the need for large PDF files to correct all the mistakes. The mistakes are so many that people are going to feel compelled to repurchase the books when they are eventually reprinted, undoing much of the goodwill generated with the free rules upgrade.

So, ignoring all the errors, the changes in the lists are a mixed bag. Overall prices dropped on a lot of units, mainly armor and artillery. I've seen some complaints that certain HQ teams have been dropped from units, making them less historical. For example, in the US lists, the halftrack command team has been dropped from the assault gun unit, and the jeep command team from the self-propelled AA unit. This could become a bigger issue after the errata is dealt with as now BF appears to be changing actual historical composition in order to make gameplay easier. Something sure to annoy those of us with an interest in the historical side of things.

Finally, BF response is slow as usual. They have made a few responses to issues, but only a small fraction of the issues brought up so far have been answered. Hopefully, they are going through their notes and trying to figure out what went wrong. More likely they are simply taking the weekend off.

I don't mean to rag too much on BF, but they really botched the mid-war compilation books. Even the fanbois that frequent the official forums have been hard pressed to defend the amount of errors present (although they still jump on anyone who has an issue with an intentional change in the rules or lists).

With that out of the way, how does this effect my armies? For the Soviets that I've been describing it doesn't effect them much at all. I'm dropping the tankodesantniki for a couple reasons. One, they went up in price, which combined with increased costs of air support mean that I either need to drop the air support and add tankodesantniki to the KV-1e tanks, or drop the tankodesantniki and keep the air support. Two, the rules for tankodesantniki changed a lot, and there are a lot of questions about what the changes actually mean, so until some of those questions have been answered I'll probably stay away from them. Besides, dropping the tankos means I don't actually have to paint anything new.

I'm not sure how I'm going to proceed to increase my force to 2000 points now, but I'll be working on that soon. Meanwhile, my German armored company got a windfall of new points to spend, but I'll go into that in an upcoming post.